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Thirty years ago, a shy young rookie with a soft Canadian accent and gentle smile, straight out of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Royal College of Music, made his professional debut in the back row of the Glyndebourne chorus. His name was Gerald Finley. Now aged 56, he’s the house’s uncrowned king, with a brilliant international career and reputation – someone whose integrity and artistry commands the deepest respect throughout the musical profession.

This summer the Montreal-born bass-baritone opens the season with a revival of David McVicar’s production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which he will repeat his marvellously humane and subtle characterisation of the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs – a role he first played here in 2011. Looking back over three decades, did he ever imagine that he would come this far?

“The answer is no. I can still remember how I felt that first season in the chorus – the opera was Simon Boccanegra, directed by Peter Hall and conducted by Bernard Haitink, in the old theatre [Glyndebourne was rebuilt entirely in the mid-Nineties] where everything was very homey and ad hoc, and done in good faith.”

Finley as Don Giovanni at GlyndebourneCredit:
Bill Cooper

“I was terrified to be surrounded by so many great voices and thought that I’d never get anywhere if this was the sort of competition I’d be up against. But they looked after me, and the following year, I got my first tiny solo as Flora’s servant in La Traviata – one line, ‘La cena è pronta’, dinner’s ready – and after that I was given slightly less small roles on the autumn tour, and covered bigger roles in the Festival, and by the early Nineties I was singing in Così fan tutte and Figaro opposite Renee Fleming and suddenly I felt adult.

“I’ve been back many seasons since, and it’s what I think of as home” – literally so, as he brought up his children in nearby Lewes and continues to live a short drive away in East Sussex . “The support I’ve received here has been beyond price, including the award that allowed me to take lessons from Armen Boyajian, the teacher who changed everything for me.

“Glyndebourne has trusted me, and I hope I’ve returned that trust. So when they were thinking of staging Meistersinger and I had put it out that I would like to sing Hans Sachs and see whether my voice could handle Wagner, things fell into place. The intensity of musical preparation here is second to none, and it’s helped me to learn how to pace the role. It’s a marathon, not that I know much about marathons.”

But Finley can certainly go the distance, and he has now reached that seigneurial phase when he has the wisdom of experience to pass on to the young – something he greatly enjoys doing, not least with the rookies in today’s Glyndebourne chorus.

“I don’t do any formal or individual teaching – I just want them to go away with something to think about. The main thing is to be patient and unpeel everything until you find the nub that is your own voice, and not that of someone else you want to sound like. Purity and honesty are the keys.”

Keeping such principles uncompromised in the ferocious world of opera is a struggle, but surprisingly Finley does not complain about modern production excesses. “Perhaps I’ve been lucky, but I’ve never really suffered from them. I’ve certainly been asked to do some quite interesting things such as Don Giovanni, and I use my mother as a barometer. I feel that if she can handle seeing me doing that stuff, then it’s OK. So far the worst comment has been ‘Well, I’m glad you’re not that person off-stage’.”

Finley worries about the need for singers today to sell themselves on imageCredit:
Sim Canetty-Clarke

He was playing the title role during the notorious Guillaume Tell fiasco at Covent Garden last summer, but wasn’t on stage when the booing and barracking erupted during a graphically presented gang rape scene. “All I can say is that nobody expected it in rehearsal – in the heat of the performance, the scene somehow gained in intensity. When I heard the rumpus from the wings, I thought – wow, people are getting involved, there are opinions going on here, and that’s quite something.”

Finley feel strongly about the increasing need for singers to sell themselves “on image rather than what they can do. Because I was a late developer and under the radar, I never had that problem myself, but I’ve seen the toll that the media promotion machine has taken on others.” He’s also infuriated by “the way that the internet makes it impossible to keep control over what we produce. We should own what we do live in performance, that’s what matters. If someone films me on a phone and it comes up on YouTube or whatever, it’s like a poster of a great painting for which the artist gets no royalties. If I want to listen to something, buy it first. I do.”

It’s a hardline attitude that perhaps reflects the view of his second wife, the powerful agent Heulwen Keyte, who numbers big crossover stars such as Katherine Jenkins and Alfie Boe among her clients. Finley does not share the general disparagement of their mic-based singing or feel that it shortchanges the art. “There’s room for all of us. They do their thing, and it takes skill. I respect that. Audiences don’t go away disappointed.”

But there are no short cuts or crutches to help him sing to such a consistently high standard, and he watches his health carefully. “Hydration is the key,” he says and perhaps “because of a childhood mostly spent out in the Canadian forest, I’m a fresh-air fiend” – one who last year climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for a musical charity.

But so all-consuming is his passion for music that he has scant time for hobbies. “I’m always learning something.” He has a remarkable record for creating leading roles in new operas – John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie among them – and his repertory is constantly enlarging. Recently he took on Verdi’s Falstaff for the first time (“huge fun”) and his first Scarpia in Tosca is in the diary.

Smooth crossover may not be his bag, but he was sorry to be forced to pull out of his first stab at Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd last year. “I know I could do it, and one day I hope I will. And because Christopher Plummer is one of my Canadian heroes, I even sometimes daydream about finishing my career as Captain von Trapp. What a great way to go that would be.”

That end is nowhere in sight yet, but “I think I’d be fine if it all stopped tomorrow. Regrets? Only that I can’t physically split myself down the middle and live in Canada with the family as well as having the international career.

“But when I started at Glyndebourne, I thought I’d give it three years and if nothing happened, I’d try something else. Well, it seems to have happened and so far, I’d give it 11 out of 10.”

Free streaming of opera from Glyndebourne 2016

This summer the Telegraph is once again teaming up with Glyndebourne to offer our readers free broadcasts of the festival’s operas. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg will be streamed on the Telegraph website on Tuesday July 12 at 6.50pm. For full details, visit telegraph.co.uk/glyndebourne